Any "5,000 year vision" will be functionally worthless as a planning document; the rate of change businesses contend with makes it hard to imagine market and technology contexts in two years, let alone ten, and never mind millennia; think of how a business owner 1,000 years ago would have planned for his next centuries. Projecting roadmaps or milestones into a future whose contexts are unknowable won't help with decisions or prioritization or anything operational.

But as a contemporary expression of classic internal corporate marketing, the vision may be effective. Even if mission statements and values posters have passed into the realm of parody, the need for enterprises to inculcate the proper mores into their employees, orienting them along with company culture and inspiring them to feats of productivity, demands that management not give up.

Although some of the folks I know at Square maintain a skeptical detachment from the intense culture, some don't, and indeed seem to find it resonant and motivating. In this sense, Dorsey's simply executed a fairly straightforward marketing maneuver that coheres with his other aesthetic and rhetorical emphases, like his obsession with the Golden Gate Bridge, for example.

In both cases, Dorsey makes Square seem like something much more than a "startup" or a "business": it seems profound, like something that shapes societies, histories, civilizations, even. Gesturing towards the Golden Gate Bridge's union of beauty, engineering, and future-orientation, Dorsey can say: "It wasn't just a bridge: it reshaped San Francisco's history, and therefore Silicon Valley's history, and America's, and the world's, in ways that only some could foresee."

In other words: a 5,000 year vision may be effective for

marketing one's company to reporters, investors, recruits, or new hires by making it seem profound and historic whether it is or isn't;

repackaging some "core values" without using the phrase "core values," which would make your hip employees roll their Warby-Parker covered eyes so hard they'd need to take the rest of the day off;

and instantiating ideas of long-term impact, scale, scope, transformation, empowerment, and so on in a device that's bold and audacious, perhaps appealing to the coveted and self-regarding younger talent which wants not to work on "business" but on "changing the world."

Square seems to do pretty well with recruiting, and lots of the people I know there are under the impression that they're doing something really, really important, something deep and transformative and little-understood beyond their walls. Whatever criticisms one might make of Square or Dorsey, it's commonly argued that this attitude is an extremely good one for employees of a technology company to have, and if one thinks (a) that it is and (b) that Square employees tend to have it, one might have to concede that the 5,000 year vision has some efficacy.